


Look at her, with her eyes like a flame

by heavenisalibrary



Series: Tumblr Prompt Fills [16]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-26
Updated: 2014-08-26
Packaged: 2018-02-14 20:41:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,409
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2202366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/heavenisalibrary/pseuds/heavenisalibrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>No hopeful young couples ever came to that orphanage. Now River knows why, but when she was younger, sometimes she’d forget all about the Silence for days at a time, and she still has strange, abstract nightmares about that bone-deep feeling of being unwanted. She turns away from the Doctor and clenches her jaw, closing her eyes for a second before she shoves it all to the back of her mind and continues to work.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look at her, with her eyes like a flame

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: river gets sentimental over something, possibly wanting to save what the doctor wants to leave behind.

It’s an orphanage for all intents and purposes, though it’s not on earth, and it doesn’t so much house and care for children as use them as cheap labor and shove them into a too-small room at night with too-few beds and not a single night light, which River notes, even if the Doctor doesn’t.

“Not the worst I’ve seen,” the Doctor says to her under his breath as they steal through the corridors late at night. There’s a piece of art — the request was nonspecific; jewelry or art or sculpture, they’re not sure — that was stolen by the proprietor of the orphanage and its owner wants it back. It’s something of great cultural significance, River knows. The Doctor crowed about it endlessly when they got word — she just barely managed to resist pointing out how much of his enthusiasm fell under the category of ‘archaeology’ — but all River could think after they’d seen the orphanage was that, if the diplomat whom the Doctor corresponded with was so concerned about this piece of art and yet failed to mention the dismal state and regulation of the orphanage that housed his country’s children, well. River didn’t want anything to do with it. Still, the Doctor was hard to resist, even when she wants to dig her heels in. “Mind you, it’s not great. It could do with a paint job, and I can’t say I’m a fan of child labor, although, you know, planets have their cultures, and who am I to —”

River’s nails dig into the back of his hand where he’s holding it, and he stops speaking, jerking his hand from her with a gasp and rubbing the back.

“I’ve seen worse too,” River says, busying her hands with her handheld computer, even though she hasn’t anything to do on it, just to resist the urge to slap him. “ _And_ , in case you’ve forgotten, I’ve lived in worse. Not to mention I’ve seen first hand the worst case scenario of forcing a child to be alone and do a job. Do you remember Berlin, Doctor?”

The Doctor has the good grace to wince, his face instantly darkening, but he doesn’t say anything. They talk about her past, sometimes — they have, over the years, shared more of themselves with one another than with anyone else. She knows bits and bobs about all his faces and all of his lives, and has made a guest appearance in more than a few. He in turn knows the basics of her upbringing. It was hard for her to talk about, at first, but now she’s more wary of his reaction than anything else. Of course, he’s always kind and tender and compassionate toward her — he’s quick to tell her that it’s not her fault, that he’s sorry, that she’s amazing _now_ and that’s what counts, but he gets so broody afterward that she’s grown somewhat cautious of telling him too much too quickly. She’s not always with him, and she knows he’d never tell her, but she worries about what he might do, alone with that great big brain and great big fury and the TARDIS who also loves her with the same fierce protectiveness to take him wherever he needs to go; she wants revenge on her captors, one day. She thinks she’ll kill most of them and not regret it for a minute — but she doesn’t want that on the Doctor’s hands. He’s got enough ghosts to contend with already.

She hears him sigh and rolls her eyes, tucking her handheld away and follows along behind him as he tiptoes along the corridor. He’s not a cat burglar, though, and after a moment, it’s River who sighs, and shoves him slightly as she passes to the front.

“What are you —”

River holds a finger to her lips to hush him before turning away and continuing down the corridor. They don’t really need to be that quiet — there’s no security system in place to pick up noise, since they’d taken it out upon entering, but she doesn’t want to listen to him right now. She feels calm — she always does during a job — and having something to do and a problem to solve slows her thoughts and gives her focus and purpose. But it requires a great deal of compartmentalization tonight; she can feel a simmering anger in the back of her mind, buzzing behind her thoughts of the blueprints and electric wiring and security camera grid, and she doesn’t think she’ll be able to keep it in the background if the Doctor says something to set her off in his aggravating, oblivious way.

They come to a door at the end of the hall and River stops short — she can both hear and feel the Doctor stumbling to halt behind her, and his hands come to rest on her hips as he steadies himself. Normally, that sort of unconscious intimacy would make her a bit giddy — as is, she sort of wants to slap his hands away. She starts at the keypad of the room by the door — there’ll be layers of security to get through, she’s sure — but it’s clear the Doctor feels the tension in her frame, and he doesn’t move his hands. Instead his grip tightens slightly as he steps even closer to her, pressing a soft kiss at the skin above the collar of her black catsuit, and she’s not sure if she’s happy or annoyed that her hair’s up, giving him easy access. His thumbs smooth soft circles over her hips as he presses himself against her back, placing featherlight kisses against the back of her neck and tops of her shoulders. The position is intimate, but there’s no pressure — the feeling of his body lined up against hers brings her comfort more than heat, and with a sigh she relaxes back into him.

“I’m sorry,” he says into her ear, kissing the side of her neck. “I knew this would be… challenging for you. I was trying to distract you, by talking — I didn’t really think about what I was saying —”

“It’s fine,” River says, keying in the last couple of digits.

“It’s not,” says the Doctor, “I’m an idiot. I think so much that I don’t think.”

River snorts, and the door clicks open.

“I didn’t marry you for your sensitivity, sweetie,” River says as they enter the room. She doesn’t look at the Doctor, because she just wants to get the job down and get out of the building as quickly as possible, even though she knows that she’s not going to be able to leave without trying to help the kids here. She suspects the Doctor knows too, and that he’d try to dissuade her out of practicality, so she carefully avoids so much as turning in his general direction as the set to the security control room. He’s persistent, though, in a way he so seldom is; she knows he loves her, most of the time, but he’s not one for sentimentality. Besides, if they apologized after every fight, forty percent of their time would be taken up by apologies, since they spend so much of it bickering. He comes up behind her where she stands over the main computer, but instead of somewhat passively leaning against her, he turns her around to face him, and she gasps a bit to find him so close.

“Maybe not,” he says, “but you don’t need to give me a free pass on being an oblivious git.”

“I’d have gone with ‘insensitive twat’, myself.”

“Either way,” he says, “you deserve better. I’m sorry.”

“You already said.”

“I wanted to make sure you’re listening,” he says. “I know how you are when you get to do a heist. All sexy catsuits and clever rewiring and everything else tucked in the back of your brain, well — I wanted to make sure you heard.”

River smiles slightly. She doesn’t tell him that he’s only almost right — she doesn’t tell him that she does compartmentalize, and that the compartment that isn’t being used to hack the building’s security system is entirely devoted to keeping herself under control so that she doesn’t put him in danger doing something stupid — or perhaps worse, that she doesn’t lash out at him for something that isn’t his fault. He raises his brows and hums a bit, and she knows he’s waiting for an answer, but she doesn’t have it. The only words in her head are bitter or cruel, and so instead she leans back into him, stands on her tip-toes, and kisses him.

He knows the evasion immediately, and she can tell by the way he sighs into her mouth — they’ve been together long enough that she knows him, knows him in the sort of way a writer might know the antagonist of their book — someone whole and complicated and dark and bitter and sweet, someone she’s reconstructed out of words and memories in her little blue diary, someone she’s studied for many years in the words of others and in paintings on ancient walls. She thinks she could probably rebuild him entirely, molecule by molecule; she thinks she could reroute all the paths from his heart and the way his bandy limbs fit together in bone beneath the skin, redraw his flesh in the perfect shade and dot it with freckles and moles and scars, all the little lived-in marks that she’s run her fingers and lips and tongue over late at night. So she knows his sounds, too — knows the sigh he makes when he’s so gone on her that she could ask him anything, knows the sigh he makes when he’s impatient, knows the way his exhalations hitch when he wants her so much that he could just sink his teeth into her, and the sigh he makes as he parts his lips is the sort of sound that escapes him when he’s letting her get away with something. When she was younger and wilder, it was letting her keep small things she nicked, or the sort of sigh he let out before helping her start some stupidly dangerous trouble — now that she’s older and he’s still older yet, it’s mostly the sound he makes when she hides from him things he already knows.

Sometimes she hates being married to a man that’s already seen every bit of her. He lets her hide when she needs to, but it’s an uncomfortable sort of catch twenty-two, because she knows him too well for him to fool her when he pretends not to know her as well as she does. It’s stupid and complicated and it aches all over but she knows she’d never have it any other way. She supposes, though, that’s another little hitch in their lives — she’d never have it any other way, and that’s why it is the way it is. Their lives are in a loop, and she chooses him over and over and over again.

His hands splay over her back and he runs them up and down her spine, settling one into the curve of her lower back and pressing her closer to him. She curls her hands into his lapels, brushing her thumbs against the bowtie as she lets him sooth her desperation with his calm, steady affection. River thinks one day it’ll be the other way around — one day he’ll be young and confused and angry and half in love and kiss her like he wants to kill her — it’ll be delicious and ironic — and she’ll be able to soothe him with the sort of confident, competent love, the sort of emotion that settles over thousands of years — emotional geology — that he holds for her now. She doesn’t look forward to it.

His hands smooth around to her front, sliding down her hips as she continues to kiss him, and she gasps a bit in surprise as she feels him begin to bunch her dress up. Normally she’d let him — normally this is her favorite part of adventures, but though kissing him serves to calm and refocus her and allow her not to answer all at once, she can’t stand the thought of being naked with him now. She pulls away from him, and gives him a gentle shove away and a wink, as though she’s teasing, as though her mind’s not already back to racing through all those years she spent wandering and forgetting in those long, dark corridors. Rows and rows of empty beds and no children except for one.

No hopeful young couples ever came to that orphanage. Now River knows why, but when she was younger, sometimes she’d forget all about the Silence for days at a time, and she still has strange, abstract nightmares about that bone-deep feeling of being unwanted.

She turns away from the Doctor and clenches her jaw, closing her eyes for a second before she shoves it all to the back of her mind and continues to work.

_____

The job is easy enough. They get back the artifact — some shiny necklace with precious stones the Doctor natters on about as River resists the urge to be violently ill — she’d been traded away for an ideology, and it’s done a number on her, so she can’t even fathom what it would do to the kids here to find out that they rate lower on their government’s scale than a necklace with some precious stones. She and the Doctor are halfway back to the TARDIS when River decides she can’t do it anymore. She stops short, reaching into her belt compartment for her lipstick and applying a quick coat before tucking it away.

The Doctor gets a few yards away before he realizes she’s no longer following. He turns around and raises a brow at her.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, sweetie,” she says. She’s the best liar in the universe, maybe, except for him, but he knows all her tells. He straightens his bow tie and stalks toward her on those ridiculous legs, coming to stand right before her.

“Why’d you stop?”

“Must I have a reason?”

“You always have a reason,” he says.

“So do you,” River says.

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” River says.

He leans a bit closer to her, and they’re nearly nose to nose, and she can see the realization in his eyes the moment his eyes fall to her lips, but before he can react she grabs the collar of his shirt and plants a smacking kiss on his lips.

“River Song, you can’t just — I’m a Time Lord, it doesn’t —”

“Don’t be stupid, honey,” River says. “As if I couldn’t come up with a serum that would work on you.”

“Not looking forward to the testing of that,” the Doctor says, swaying somewhat where he stands.

“Oh, you should,” River purrs, “you quite enjoyed it. Do you know, it absorbs through skin on any part of the body.”

“Oh?”

River smirks. “Oh, indeed.”

He waggles his brows at her right before he passes out.

 

 

Dragging him back to the TARDIS isn’t easy, especially once he starts to wake up and is hallucinating all sorts of strange things in and around and about her hair, but she manages to wrangle him in, and the TARDIS lets her hide him away in the bedroom while she pilots the old girl just outside of the room in which the orphans sleep.

If she thought escorting the Doctor was difficult, though, she had no idea how difficult it was to hurry thirty odd orphans of various ages and temperaments into a spaceship as a stranger. It was like herding giant, sleepy, crabby, baffled cats. Eventually, though, she had them all on board. She felt the TARDIS hum — and for once, River wasn’t sure if the sound was fond or exasperated — as the old girl extended her hallways to give each child a bedroom, and River closed her eyes as she leaned against the console, listening to the sounds of running feet and bright laughter and excited voices echoing through the ship. Sometimes the Doctor traveled with more than one person, but rarely have there ever been so many people on board, and certainly not children.

It makes her hearts at once ache and sing. There’s a sense of a personal score settled, of a good deed done, and then something deeper and simpler and baser and harder for her to understand: she can’t help but think of what the TARDIS would sound like, alive with the laughter of her children. The TARDIS hums again, and River sighs, knowing that the sound that time is most definitely exasperated.

“Hush now, darling,” River says quietly, pulling the levers to send the ship into the vortex, “I’m not even really considering it. It was just a passing thought.”

The TARDIS sends River the sort of vibe that River equates to the ship rolling her eyes. River huffs.

“Shut up,” River says.

She’s still floating around the vortex, trying to decide what the best course of action is now that she’s essentially abducted a slew of orphans for whom she felt compassion but with whom she wanted almost nothing to do with — she doesn’t know if she’s good with children, but just the thought of spending time with them makes her anxious — she doesn’t even remember being a kid, mostly — and so she dawdles around the console room, settling into the swing underneath and doing exactly what she hates the Doctor to do when he’s feeling at ends: starts to fix things that don’t need fixing.

He shows up about twenty minutes into her fiddling, after the kids’ voices have mostly died down and they’ve all tucked away into their rooms. She looks up at him briefly as he leans against the base of the time rotor and frowns at her; his bowtie is missing along with his tweed, his hair is mussed beyond repair, his shirt is a bit unbuttoned, his sleeves rolled up unevenly, and his feet are bare. If she wasn’t in such a weird mood, she’d swoon to see him so deliciously unkempt.

“That was a bit rude,” the Doctor says. “You don’t have to drug me when you want some alone time, you know.”

“I’m not alone,” River says, sighing a bit and looking back to the wires she’s not really working with.

“Right,” he says, “I noticed. Got about thirty-odd strays, too. What are you going to do with them, exactly?”

“Get them out,” River says. “Anywhere. Doesn’t matter. I don’t care.”

“How do you know they weren’t happy where they were?”

“I know,” River says.

“Some of them seemed quite content —”

“I don’t know what those words mean,” River says sharply, looking up at him. She feels her lip curl a bit, and it’s half disgust with his apparent lack of empathy, and half because she knows he’s baiting her in that infuriating way he does when he knows she needs to untangle her thoughts. “Happy. Content. Funny and fickle and abstract, words like that. A girl could go mad thinking on them.”

“And did, I’d wager.”

“And did,” River says. “Sod content — I want them to be free.”

The Doctor sighs, and River looks away. She feels like she’s been doing that a lot tonight. She hears him step closer, and when she risks a glance, he’s come to kneel in front of her, lurching forward and pressing a lingering kiss to her forehead.

“Of course you do,” the Doctor says. “River Song, my bad, bad girl. Not so bad at all, eh?”

____

There’s a planet in the same solar system as the one the orphanage was on, possessing the same general makeup and native people and a similar culture. River frets about it briefly, but the Doctor reassures her — tells her it’d be like moving from America to the United Kingdom. Challenging in ways, but not too difficult. There’s an orphanage there that doesn’t call itself that at all — it’s a bright, open place full of books and laughter and teachers with kind eyes, and after a long tour that River spends asking endless questions and the Doctor spends watching her warily, River agrees, and they introduce the kids to their new home.

It feels a bit like pulling the stitches out of a freshly healed wound, River thinks. Still there, like a scar, but knit tightly together and done with the hardest bit.


End file.
